1 . In 1945, two sculptures meant to represent the average man called Norman and woman called Norma in the United States went on exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History.
That same year, a contest was launched to find a living representation of Norma. Normal is often used to mean “typical”, “expected”, or even “correct”. By that logic, most people should fit the description of normal. And yet, not one of almost 4,000 women who participated in the contest matched Norma, the supposedly “normal” woman.
This puzzle isn’t unique to Norma and Norman, either — time and time again, so-called normal descriptions of our bodies, minds, and perceptions have turned out to match almost no one. So what does normal actually mean — and should we be relying on it so much?
In statistics, a normal distribution describes a set of values that fall along a bell curve (曲线). The average, or mean, of all the values is at the very center, and most other values fall within the hump (驼峰) of the bell. Normal doesn’t describe a single data point, but a pattern of diversity. Many human traits, like height, follow a normal distribution. Some people are very tall or very short, but most people fall close to the overall average. Outside of statistics, normal often refers to an average like the single number pulled from the fattest part of the bell curve that excludes all the nuances of the normal distribution. Norma and Norman’s proportions (比例) came from such averages.
Applied to individuals, whether someone is considered normal usually depends on how closely they get to this average. At best, such definitions of normal fail to capture variation. When limited or inaccurate definitions of normal are used to make decisions that impact people’s lives, they can do real harm. There were examples in history.
To this day, people are often targeted and discriminated against on the basis of disabilities, mental health issues, and other features considered “not normal”. But the reality is that the differences in our bodies, minds, perceptions, and ideas about the world around us — in short, diversity — is the true normal.
1. What can we learn about Norman and Norma?| A．No participant fitted the description of them in the contest. |
| B．They were on display as soon as they were completed in 1945. |
| C．They were both named by the American Museum of Natural History. |
| D．People viewed them as typical and correct representations of humans. |
| A．The former and the latter fall at totally different points of the bell curve. |
| B．The former and the latter account for different puzzles in our daily life. |
| C．The latter is a single number whereas the former shows a pattern of diversity. |
| D．The latter often indicates the distribution of a set of values but the former doesn’t. |
| A．Possibilities. | B．Examples. | C．Meanings. | D．Differences. |
| A．What Is Real Normal? |
| B．When Are Humans Normal? |
| C．How Does Normal Cause Harm? |
| D．Why Shouldn’t We Rely on Normal? |
2 . A new study says that no matter how much the world cuts back on carbon emissions, a large and important part of Antarctica is expected to disappear.
The study focused on the melting of protective ice around Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea in western Antarctica. They said the “unavoidable” melting will take hundreds of years, resulting in a rise of nearly 1.8 meters in sea levels. This melting will have a profound impact on where and how people live in the future. The study, published in Nature Climate Change, warns that even if future warming was limited to just a few tenths of a degree more, it would have “limited power to prevent ocean warming that could lead to the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.”
The lead writer of the study, Kaitlin Naughten, explains that the research indicates that the Earth is on a path towards rapid ocean warming and ice shelf melting over the coming century. While past studies have talked about how serious the situation is, Naughten was the first to use computer modeling to study how warm water from below will melt the ice. The study looked at four different cases in how much carbon emissions the world produces. ln each case, ocean warming was just too much for this area of the ice to survive. It also looked at what would happen if future warming was limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius over mid-19th century levels: the international goal. They found the runaway melting process in this case as well.
The study primarily focuses on the part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet that is most at risk of melting near the Amundsen Sea, including the Thwaites ice shelf, often referred to as the “Doomsday Glacier”. According to Eric Rignot, an ice scientist at the University of California Irvine, this area is already “doomed” (注定的) due to the rapid melting that has occurred. Naughten does not like to use the word “doomed”, because she said 100 years from now, the world might not just stop but drive back carbon levels in the air and climate change. But she said what is happening now on the ground is a slow collapse that cannot be stopped, at least not in this century.
1. According to the study, what will be the consequence of the “unavoidable” melting of ice?| A．A fast collapse of the West Antarctica. |
| B．A rise in sea levels to at least 1.8 meters. |
| C．A change of people’s living places and life. |
| D．A significant reduction in carbon emissions. |
| A．Explaining why the Earth is on a path towards rapid ocean warming. |
| B．Adopting computer modeling to study the possibility of ice survival. |
| C．Finding the runaway melting process in the fourth case of ocean warming. |
| D．Comparing four cases in how much carbon emissions the world produces. |
| A．Ice shelf melting is unstoppable at least in the century. |
| B．The word “doomed” accurately describes the situation. |
| C．Carbon levels will never reach the international goal. |
| D．Past studied didn’t show how serious the situation is. |
| A．To explain the impact of carbon emissions on Antarctica. |
| B．To share the findings of a new study on Antarctic ice melting. |
| C．To analyze the potential consequences of rapid ocean warming. |
| D．To call for immediate action to prevent the Antarctic ice melting. |
3 . Explore the magic of the underwater world
Reasons for visiting Georgia Aquarium (水族馆) in Atlanta
Atlanta’s aquarium is home to tens of thousands of animals including 500 species from around the world and more than 60 habitats. The largest exhibit at Georgia Aquarium is home to whale sharks, manta rays and more swimmers. The second largest exhibit is home to six beluga whales. And you won’t want to miss the dolphin exhibit and the dolphin show at Georgia Aquarium featuring an expansive underwater dolphin viewing window and a wonderful musical theatrical performance that highlights the bond shared between dolphins and humans.
Insider tips
○Arrive when the aquarium opens to beat the crowds.
○Have a sleepover inside some of Georgia Aquarium’s exhibits.
○Wear a wet suit, dive into the water and swim with whale sharks, manta rays and more
Know before you go
○Georgia Aquarium is open 365 days a year.
○Monday-Wednesday: 9 AM-6 PM
○Thursday: 9 AM-8 PM
○Friday: 9 AM-5 PM (Early closing for the themed party Sips Under the Sea)
○Saturday-Sunday: 8 AM-9 PM
Tickets Pricing
| Penguin Encounter | Sea Lion Encounter | Dolphin Encounter | Dive with the Whale Sharks | Swim with the Whale Sharks |
| $69.99 $63.99 | $79.99 $75.99 | $79.99 $75.99 | $359.99 $335.99 | $259.99 $245.99 |
1. What can we learn about Georgia Aquarium?
| A．It includes 600 species. | B．It holds overground dolphin shows. |
| C．Visitors can stay the night there. | D．Swimmers speak highly of its performance. |
| A．At 5 PM on Tuesday. | B．At 6 PM on Friday. |
| C．At 7 AM on Saturday | D．At 8 AM on Thursday. |
| A．Dolphin Encounter. | B．Penguin Encounter. |
| C．Swim with the Whale Sharks | D．Dive with the Whale Sharks. |
4 . When a situation becomes serious, it can be difficult to think clearly. Luckily, Austen MacMillan of Florida had the knowledge he needed to save a life. It all started when he and his friend, Jason Piquette, were swimming in a pool. Everything was going fine, but things took a turn when Jason tried to see how long he could hold his breath underwater.
For a moment, 12-year-old Austen patiently waited for Jason to return to the surface. But as seconds turned to minutes, it became clear that something was wrong. By minute five or six, Austen knew it was time to action.
As quickly as he could, Austen swam to get a hold of Jason, bringing him back to the shallow end of the pool. He ran outside, screaming for help, but nobody was around. Finally, he performed CPR (心肺复苏), something he had never done before.
“I just saw it from a TV show— ‘Stranger Things’, ” Austen said. “After I gave him CPR, he woke up a few minutes later.”
Right when Jason regained consciousness, Austen’s dad got home and immediately called 911. It turned out that Jason had passed out at about 30 seconds after holding his breath. When Austen’s mom heard what happened, she could hardly believe it.
“When I first got the call from my husband, I almost felt like I couldn’t speak,” Christina MacMillan, his mom said. “My body was nearly locked up. It was definitely a really critical moment. He’s really brave.”
Through this accident, both families hope others will learn the importance of teaching kids CPR and how to dial 911 on a cellphone that is locked. And as far as Jason goes, he’s doing just fine, and he couldn’t be more grateful.
“I’m just so amazed at how wise he was in that moment,” Jason said. “And I always want him to know that he is a hero.”
1. Which is the correct order of Austen’s action?①Performed CPR on Jason②Got anxious to call for help
③Watched Jason’s performance④Watched “Stranger Things”
| A．①②③④ | B．④③②① | C．③②④① | D．④②①③ |
| A．Shocked. | B．Worried. | C．Frightened. | D．Excited. |
| A．Learn first aid knowledge. | B．Stay calm in time of crisis. |
| C．Act bravely to rescue others. | D．Appreciate Austen’s heroic action. |
| A．Humorous and calm. | B．Creative but critical. |
| C．Kind and knowledgeable. | D．Courageous and intelligent. |
5 . Many experts have praised AI’s groundbreaking potential to help people become way more efficient at their jobs, and a lot of educators have been trying it out for themselves, including me.
I’ve used ChatGPT, an AI-powered tool that can instantly answer seemingly any instruction, in my job. Of course, there are potential downsides to the new technology. It can produce inaccurate or one-sided responses based on faulty data it collects, and it has the potential to cause huge data privacy problems. Despite those risks, I have used such AI-powered tools to plan lessons, provide feedback on student assignments, and respond to parent emails. And I’m looking for other ways to use the technology to make my job easier.
Take two other teachers, for example. Mike Kerr, a high school English teacher in Tennessee, uses ChatGPT to reduce Lexile levels-the measure of an individual’s reading ability and the difficulty of a text -for his students. High school students are often required to read relatively complex classic novels. The reading homework “can be a real big task for an English learner in their first couple of months here”. To help them, Kerr uses ChatGPT to give summaries of works of literature, which saves him from having to read all the assigned literary works, so he can have more time to better guide them through the text.
April Edwards, a 6th grade social studies teacher in Texas, shares ways that she uses AI in her instruction on a social media platform. “I use AI to help create lesson plans, presentations, to write emails, and to create checklists.AI is a great resource to use as a starting point for a task or to give you ideas,” Edwards said. She has not introduced AI to her students, because she wants to fully understand it before allowing students to use it in the classroom. “My goal is to show them how to use AI responsibly and effectively and demonstrate that to my students. If I am using AI irresponsibly, then so will they,” Edwards said.
1. How does the author regard ChatGPT?| A．It is of high accuracy. | B．It is undervalued. |
| C．It brings some convenience. | D．It often misleads users. |
| A．Reduce teaching pressure. | B．Help with students’ homework. |
| C．Summarize English lessons | D．Go through the complex classics. |
| A．Supportive. | B．Worried. | C．Opposed. | D．Cautious. |
| A．Can AI improve instruction? | B．Why is AI changing education? |
| C．Should teachers apply AI to teaching? | D．How can ChatGPT encourage study? |
6 . Forgiveness (宽恕) is often considered as an important decision to let go of feelings of anger towards someone who you believe has wronged you. However, while you may be quite generous in your ability to forgive others, you can be much harder on yourself.
Accept the result of your actions
Forgiving yourself is about more than just putting the past behind you and moving on.
Treat yourself with kindness and compassion (同情)
Forgiving yourself requires facing your actions, but it is important to reach this with self-compassion.
Making a correction is an important part of forgiveness, even when the person you are forgiving is yourself. One way to move past your regret is to take action to correct your mistakes.
Learn from the experience
Forgiving yourself often requires finding a way to learn from the experience and make an active effort to do better in the future. To do this, you need to understand why you behave the way you did and why you feel sorry. What steps can you take to prevent the same behaviors again in the future?
| A．Make a correction |
| B．Be aware of others’ feelings |
| C．It is about accepting what has happened |
| D．The following steps may help you learn how to forgive yourself |
| E．You need to tell yourself that thoughts are not facts |
| F．Remind yourself of what you learned to guide your actions going forward |
| G．The key is to treat yourself with the same kindness you show to another person |
7 . A computer model created by researchers can detect ChatGPT-generated fake studies with great accuracy, a new study shows. This implies that although the artificial intelligence(AI)chatbot ChatGPT may be a decent imitator of human workers in several fields, scientific research is not one of them.
In the new study, published June 7 in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, researchers created a new computer learning program to tell the differences between real scientific papers and fake examples written by ChatGPT. The scientists trained the program to identify key differences between 64 real studies published in the journal Science and 128 papers created by ChatGPT using the same 64 papers as a prompt.
The team then tested how well their model could distinguish between a group of real papers and ChatGPT-generated papers, which included 60 real papers from the journal Science and 120 AI-generated papers. The program marked the AI-written papers more than 99%of the time and could correctly tell the differences between human-written and chatbot-written paragraphs 92%of the time.
ChatGPT-generated papers differed from human text in four key ways: paragraph complexity, sentence-level diversity in length, punctuation marks and “popular words”. For example, human authors write longer and more complex paragraphs, while the AI papers used punctuation that is not found in real papers, such as exclamation marks.
Creating computer programs to tell real papers from AI-generated ones is important because previous studies have hinted that humans may not be as good at spotting the differences and AI is still capable of fooling some humans with its science writing.
The researchers of the new study say they are pleased that their program is effective at weeding out fake papers but warn it is only a proof of concept. Much more wide-scale studies are needed to create better models that are even more reliable and can be trained to specific scientific disciplines to maintain the integrity of the scientific method.
1. Which of the following statements may be true according to the passage?| A．Paragraphs created by ChatGPT are shorter and easier. |
| B．Every human behaviour can be imitated by ChatGPT. |
| C．AI-generated papers can be correctly recognized by humans. |
| D．Humans are better at telling real papers from AI-generated ones. |
| A．The complexity of the test. |
| B．The importance of AI-generated papers. |
| C．The effectiveness of the computer model. |
| D．A perfect match between AI-generated papers and real papers. |
| A．Favorable. | B．Pessimistic. | C．Skeptical. | D．Cautious. |
| A．The application of ChatGPT in paper writing. |
| B．A computer program to identify.AI-generated papers. |
| C．The difference between AI-generated papers and real papers. |
| D．Possibility for ChatGPT to create convincing scientific papers. |
8 . When the company OpenAI developed its new artificial intelligence (AI) program, ChatGPT, in late 2022, educators began to worry. ChatGPT could create text that seemed like a human wrote it. How could teachers discover whether students were using language created by an AI chatbot to cheat on a writing task?
As a linguist who studies the effects of technology on how people read, write and think, I believe there are other more pressing concerns besides cheating. These include whether AI, more generally, threatens student writing skills, the value of writing as a process, and the importance of regarding writing as a tool for thinking.
As part of my research on the effects of AI on human writing, I surveyed young adults in the U.S. about some issues related to those effects. One participant said that at some point if you depend on predictive text, you’re going to lose your spelling abilities. Enter “Was Rom” into a Google search and you’re given a list of choices like “Was Rome built in a day”. Type “ple” into a text message and you’re offered “please” and “plenty”. These tools complete our sentences automatically, giving us little chance to think about our spelling, and continuously asking us to follow their suggestions.
Evan Selinger, a philosopher, worried that predictive texting reduces the power of writing as a form of mental activity and personal expression. “By encouraging us not to think too deeply about our words, predictive technology may change how we deal with each other,” Selinger wrote. “We give others more algorithms (算法) and less of ourselves. Automation can stop us thinking and the resulting text didn’t feel like mine anymore.”
I asked ChatGPT whether it was a threat to humans’ motivation to write. The bot responded: “There will always be a demand for creative, original content that requires the unique viewpoint of a human writer.” It continued: “Writing serves many purposes beyond just the creation of content, such as self-expression, communication, and personal growth, which can continue to encourage people to write even if certain types of writing can be automated.”
I was glad to find the program had seemingly admitted its limitations.
1. What is the author’s main concern about ChatGPT?| A．Whether it will lead to students’ cheating. |
| B．Whether it will shape students’ writing style. |
| C．How students will make use of it at school. |
| D．What effects it will have on students’ writing. |
| A．Give us more creative ideas. | B．Make us write like a machine. |
| C．Encourage us to think more deeply. | D．Make us tend to ignore grammatical mistakes. |
| A．Writing will become completely automated. | B．Robots will work with humans in writing. |
| C．Robot writing will become more creative. | D．Human writing will still matter a lot. |
| A．What impact will AI bring to writing? | B．What is the future of modern literature? |
| C．How to improve writing with AI’s help? | D．How to apply AI technology to education? |
9 . Caring for a garden can be an escape from the worries of the COVID19 pandemic. It can get the whole family outside, happily bonding (建立信任关系) while doing an activity together.
Pick the right spot.
Choose a plot size. Beginners should start small, considering what they can handle (应付). The recommended size is 11 rows wide, each 10 feet long.
Make sure there’s enough space between each row to be able to easily walk through. The rows shouldn’t be more than 4 feet wide, as you probably won’t be able to reach over bigger width to care for the vegetables.
Select your vegetables. There are several vegetables that are common and easy to grow: tomatoes, peppers, cabbages, lettuce and carrots.
| A．Decide where and when to plant. |
| B．Also consider what you like to eat. |
| C．It can also help to secure food supplies. |
| D．Don’t plant all your seeds at one time. |
| E．you’re able to see the fruit of that effort. |
| F．But this guideline is to feed a family of four through an entire summer. |
| G．Choosing a suitable location is important because it affects the quality of the vegetables. |
10 . College life is colorful.
Use technologies. Many modern students can back up the fact that technologies make studying easier and faster. You don’t always have to waste time to go to a library when you can find everything online. You can save time on calculating things and solving different problems.
Give yourself a treat.
All in all, college time is a very special period when you learn a lot of things including time management techniques. If you take them seriously, you can use them in your future and make your work and life more productive and organized.
| A．Help each other. |
| B．Help to take notes. |
| C．There are many fun things to do. |
| D．You can see many colorful things. |
| E．There are now many apps for that. |
| F．It is a nice motivation to be productive. |
| G．You can give yourself some small treats for finishing small tasks. |
